What he is not is a Muslim. But a transient apparently thought he was. Five weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the man clubbed Singh unconscious in the sunlit lobby of the SeaTac Crest Motor Inn.

"You still here? Go to back to Allah!" Singh remembers the man shouting just before striking him twice.

Singh, 49, practices Sikhism, a religion founded in 1469 in the Punjab region of India. Sikh religious code requires men to wear turbans and not to shave their beards, leading some people to confuse them with Muslims.

But Singh is clean-shaven and his short hair is uncovered -- he is not a baptized Sikh, he explained -- and figures his assailant, John Bethel, just doesn't like foreigners. He said Bethel was never a customer but had entered the lobby a week after 9/11, telling him, "Go back to your country!"

Hate crimes against Arab Americans, Muslims, Sikhs and other groups in the United States spiked in the weeks following 9/11, then decreased, according to the FBI.

Nearly two years later, when someone asks him about the assault or when he hears about others being attacked for their ethnicity or national origin, "it reminds me of everything."